8.9 Earthquake Hits Japan

An 8.9 earthquake hit Japan near Tokyo during the night. It was around 2 in the afternoon in Japan when the earthquake hit. The epicenter was right off the coast. Tsunamis have hit Japan. Hawaii and the entire Pacific Basin are under tsunami warning meaning imminent danger. Our entire west coast line, Canada and Alaska are under this warning.

Pictures coming in of the tsunamis already hitting Japan have been in TV all night. This earthquake is the largest in Japan since such data has been recorded.

Watching the videos of the destruction does put things in perspective and makes some things “seem pretty puny and trivial,” as Emma said. Waiting for Pat Robertson to chime in and reveal what the Japanese did.

I wonder if the Mormons have kicked into action? They have huge warehouses, very well catalogued and arranged, for emergency replacement supplies. When Katrina happened (and other disasters around the world), many young mormons flock to these centers and literally form firelines, passing materials and packing them up.

The Mormons are often the first on the ground with rescue supplies. They don’t just send supplies. They stay and pitch in to help. It is part of living their faith. They get very little publicity for this kind of work.

IWAKI, Japan – An explosion at a nuclear power plant on Japan’s devastated coast destroyed a building Saturday and made leaking radiation, or even outright meltdown, the central threat menacing a nation just beginning to grasp the scale of a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami.

The Japanese government said radiation emanating from the plant appeared to have decreased after the blast, which produced an intensifying cloud of white smoke that swallowed the complex. But authorities did not say why, and the precise cause of the explosion and the extent of the ongoing danger were not clear.

Good question. The VATF1 (International Urban Search and Rescue) website says 200 personnel from the Fairfax County fire and rescue rosters. A mix of professionals and volunteers plus civilian specialists. They train regularly to maintain skill specialities, often without financial compensation. They and the team in LA are the only ones of the kind in the country. They have some coordinating relationship with the federal emergency response apparatus.

I heard that about 70 from Fairfax were headed for Japan with equipment and the trained search dogs. As I understand it, if you can cut loose fast from other local obligations and get there first, you get to go. They really have their work cut out for them given the wide swath of destruction and an unknown number of missing. And now you’ve got some possibility of nuclear radiation in the mix to boot.

There is a photo in the LA Times of the city of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture which must be the way Hiroshima looked in 1945. The Fairfax rescue team probably could use all 200 of their people and everything else they have available.

They have upgraded the Japanese quake to 9.0; and some are predicting an aftershock of 6.7 in a couple of days. According to scientists at Caltech in Pasadena, California, a series of very sensitive sensors across Japan made this one of the best recordings ever of a quake. Apparently the quake was so strong that it shifted the Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair. Truly awesome.